In Sweden anyone can look up where you live. And your earnings. And your grades from school. All government data is public, unless it is secret. (If you live under serious threats you can apply to get your data classified, in which case it is only allowed to be handled by people with clearance for that, which tend to make your life a bit complicated.)
Since it is the same for everyone, including the prime minister and the king which is kind of the point for a society that wishes to be transparent, it doesn't make much difference for the prevalence of spammy services. Except maybe lowering the market value of address registers.
Well the last two things are or should be illegal. If law enforcement in the US actually cared about enforcing the bulk of the law instead of only the parts which are personally profitable (drugs), you wouldn't really need to worry about them. Regarding debt collectors, well predatory lending practices are illegal as well, and beyond that its your personal responsibility to pay your debts.
Well, anyone can look up a person's census address, which isn't necessarily where you live, but it's probably an address you have control over, or someone else lives there who you trust.
When you interact with government or banks or anyone that needs to send you important documents, those are mailed to your census address, and nowhere else. It makes it much harder to do identity theft. (Basically, the whole transparent system makes it a lot easier to prevent identity theft)
I don't see how spammy services would benefit from this, for what it's worth I received a crapton more directly addressed spam when I lived in SF than when I lived in Stockholm.
Stalkers are handled by the system, as other commenters have pointed out, you can get a protected address, which means that very few can look up your census address.
Debt collectors... Explain to me in what way it is bad that someone whom you owe money can find you? Hiding to avoid paying debt you actually owe is illegal.
What's better, having one centralized database that's open and public or have thousands of databases kept by thousands of private companies and government offices some of which are incomplete or inaccurate?
Except there's all these companies who compile all these databases poorly. So the information ends up in one place anyways. It just ends up inaccurate and incomplete. It's also close to impossible to know who has what on you.
